Rocio Rodriguez has been exploring the complexities of tangled
skeins of lines in her painting for a while now. In an untitled series
of paintings from 2003-2004, the intertwinings read as plant forms;
presented against neutral grounds, they resemble botanical
illustrations. In her current, much denser abstract compositions, the
suggestion is of cartography, though Rodriguez's expressive schemas
map not just cities but also bodily, psychological, and political
terrains.

Terminus ... Atlanta (all works 2007)--the title includes the
city's original name and its current one--is a large palimpsest of
shapes, each layer all but obliterating the previous ones. The dominant
color is an orange-brown suggestive of the Georgia clay on which the
city is built, and that is revealed anew with each fresh wave of
construction. What presumably represents a grid of streets on the
painting's right-hand side also suggests a human rib cage, while a
thick black line that snakes up the center is one of many intestinal
forms to appear in Rodriguez's work. The painting thus evokes the
city's history of self-erasure and reconstruction and proposes a
metaphoric view of the metropolis as a body continually cut open and
stitched back together.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The palette of some works closely resembles that of maps, disparate
but repeated colors differentiating one section from another. In The
Country Inside, the most explicitly cartographic sections are off-white,
crisscrossed by dark veins that could define streets and buildings.
These lighter passages weave through flat areas of brown and looping
black intestinal forms. Given the title, and the general resemblance of
the off-white areas to maps of Cuba, Rodriguez's country of origin,
the painting may suggest the ways geography is internalized and
entangled with psychology to inform-personal identity.

Rodriguez uses another palette in some works, however, one in which
ocher and cadmium red feature prominently and that strongly recalls
Philip Guston's paintings of the 1950s. Guston, too, had an
interest in maps, as evidenced by works such as Zone, 1953-54, and The
Street, 1956. In both, areas of color emerging from light gray surrounds
suggest concentrations of streets or buildings. But if Guston's
paintings are Abstract Expressionist takes on the representational
conventions of printed maps, Rodriguez drags the style into the age of
Google Earth. Typically, online maps present dense welters of
information: One can see aerial views, street-level views, and intimate
close-ups side by side on the same screen. Rodriguez's paintings
similarly combine different views. The conventional aerial view still
seems to dominate, but different areas appear as if shown at different
scales, revealing different densities of pattern and texture.

Rodriguez employs this Guston-like palette in two paintings whose
titles engage provocatively with geopolitics: Rogue State and The Round
City, Baghdad. In the former, the looping lines rendered elsewhere in
black are painted in vivid red, making them more explicitly gutlike.
Exactly which (or what kind of) state is being identified as rogue is
unclear, but the red lines violently disrupt and obliterate the more
delicately limned adjacent zones. The Round City similarly evokes
violence, as the contour of Baghdad is rendered in smeared,
bloody-looking strokes and clotted points.

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